Cloudinary Blog

ClickMechanic, a London-based, online marketplace for automobile mechanics, has chosen Cloudinary as its media-asset manager for over five years. James Wozniak, ClickMechanic’s full-stack software developer, recently talked with us about the company’s experience with Cloudinary.

The future of marketing depends on dynamic visual experiences. Marketers must connect with customers across multiple channels – the web, mobile, kiosks, email, search, and social as well as print and real time events. They must build brand awareness in increasingly noisy (and competitive) marketplaces. To rise above the noise, marketers must become well-versed in all things rich media -- using images, short and long form videos, and interactive contents in new ways to raise awareness, deliver powerful experiences, and boost engagement.

As Stencil’s founders were developing a web-based design tool for small businesses and other organizations that couldn’t afford to hire a graphic designer, they needed an image management solution that would render, manipulate, and resize images within each design. Cloudinary’s rich set of functionalities enabled Stencil to avoid the hassles and complexity of building their own image management product, while providing users with an easy-to-use means for doing image transformations and delivering final designs that are sized perfectly for their needs.

At MyCreativeShop, we offer templates for customers to create print designs and then print them with us or elsewhere. Brochures, flyers, postcards, and door hangers are our specialty. Early on, customers told us that they found it difficult to visualize what their designs would actually look like once printed. We needed to do better than showing boring, “flat” preview images of the finished designs to them—we needed to bring those images to life!

Building engaging websites and apps are often primary goals for developers and marketers. The key to increasing your site’s performance is making your content relevant and engaging, and your website fast and fun to use.

When you visit a website—whether from your laptop, phone, or tablet—you expect the pages to load fast and all the images to look great. However, ensuring that websites live up to visitor expectations can be more complicated than it might seem.

In May 2018, Cloudinary sponsored Capitol Music Group’s first hackathon held by its new Capitol360 Innovation Center, which aims at connecting musicians and software technologists to facilitate and stimulate the creation of music. See this interview for details. As a starter project for the hackathon, we built a sample app called Music Discovery Service.

Over the past several years, I've had a chance to participate in hackathons, as part of teams that developed a social payment app and helped users decide meals to cook. But it wasn't until last month that I got to experience a hackathon from the other side, as a judge.

Over the life of a mobile device, the cost of a cellular data plan often exceeds that of the device itself. To optimize data usage and purge useless data on their mobile devices, users can enable Data Saver from Android 7.0 (API level 24). To do so, users toggle Data Saver in quick settings under the Notification shade or under Settings > Data usage. With Data Saver enabled, apps that aren't whitelisted cannot use cellular data in the background. They are also directed to consume less data while active.

At Cloudinary, we manage the entire pipeline of media assets for thousands of customers of varying sizes from numerous verticals. Cloudinary is an end-to-end solution for all your image and video needs, including upload, storage, administration, manipulation, optimization and dynamic delivery.